Joyce asked, “How much did you pay for an unraced 1-year-old filly?”
“Five hundred seventy-five thousand,” Klein said, and then paused. “Yes, honey, we went way over budget…but hell, buying horses was your idea. I want you to be happy!”
Young 2-year-old thoroughbred fillies don’t have testosterone running through their veins making them big and often stupid like their brothers. Just walking down the shed row, colts will prove they are born different than their sisters. They dart their heads out of their stalls to play by biting faces, hands, or any other extremity within reach. Their sisters usually nuzzle up to their grooms and handlers, playfully prodding to get more carrots or just to get rubs and affection.
Winning Colors was different. She would physically intimidate her grooms and especially the other horses around her, regardless of their sex or age. She was high strung and when someone tried to put a halter on her, she would rear back and threaten to kill them. Eventually her handlers learned to put on the halter disassembled, and then put it back together after it was slipped over her head.
As she aged, Winning Colors filled in with even more muscle. She was so tall, seasoned horsemen in the barn couldn’t believe she wasn’t a grown, older, male racehorse. Now a 2-year-old, Winning Colors looked like a 4-year-old mature, full-grown male.
Barn of D. Wayne Lukas at Santa Anita Racetrack, May 1986
In May 1986, Lukas called one of his young grooms, Luis Palos, into his private office. The 25-year-old groom had been with Lukas for two years now and was a smart, hard-working, polite, and quiet young man from Mexico City. Luis came to work on time in clean blue jeans and polished cowboy boots. His jet-black hair was neatly trimmed and combed.
Luis was worried. He had never been called into señor Lukas’s private office, and feared he was to be let go. He said, “Hola, señor.”
Lukas shook his hand and looked him straight in the eye for three seconds. “Luis…I like you. I’ve been watching you. You come in early every day. You look sharp and work hard.”
“Gracias, señor.”
“I have a filly for you. She’s special. She needs someone like you. I want you to personally take care of her…Winning Colors.”
Luis smiled. He wasn’t being fired. He’d been chosen to work with the big filly. “Si, I know her. Ella es la gran potra [filly]. Posiblemente…a little…dangerous.”
Lukas laughed, “Yes, that’s the one. She’s your responsibility now. You take good care of her, Luis…and you can make more money. I need you to travel with her, too. I know you have a wife and three children. Can you go on airplanes with her? You will be going to New York with her soon.”
“Si, señor. My wife can watch mis niños…no problema.”
With that, Luis was personally assigned one of the most promising young horses in a stable of over 200 horses. Since Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California was their home base, Luis knew Lukas would check in on him multiple times per day. But he also knew he could advance his career, and one day, perhaps become an assistant trainer and stop having to perform the daily hard manual labor required of a groom. Luis was being paid $6.25 per hour, $2 over minimum wage, to care for a 2-year-old horse now worth over $1,000,000.
Luis treated her like she belonged to him, even making his wife, Mariana, pack special treats in his lunch pail to give to the filly every day. He was known to have said, “If I don’t bring her food every day she will kill me! Really…. She will kill me!”
On his first day with Winning Colors, Luis had made the mistake of grabbing her by the ear. She violently threw her head into him, giving him a black eye and bloody lip. Luis learned not to let anyone, ever, touch her ears. He feared for anyone who got too close to her, as they could get hurt, and, injure her in the process. Winning Colors only let Luis touch her anywhere near her head, and the stablehands learned to always have Luis present to calm her down when the veterinarians or blacksmiths came to work on her racing plates (shoes) and hooves.
He was tender with her, and she learned to trust him. She relaxed when he spoke to her. He nicknamed her Mamacita.
Luis liked working for Lukas because he loved the horses—but not the hours. At most barns, the day would start early at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m., but for the Lukas barn, it started at 3:30 a.m.
The other barns would start with the assistant trainers, grooms, and hot walkers trying to get warm around the coffee pot, but the Lukas barn allowed no coffee pot distraction. Lukas had a worker every day that just groomed the ground while following every man, woman, and horse around to rake the footprints into a special, Lukas-selected fan pattern in the dirt. The trainer Willard Proctor had been quoted as saying of Lukas, “I don’t know if he can train a horse…but he sure can landscape.”
The Lukas barn looked like a Four Seasons Hotel compared to the other barns, always with fresh flowers planted everywhere and D. Wayne Lukas logos all over the stable blankets, trucks, water buckets, flowerpots, horse halters, saddles, t-shirts, hats, and jackets around the barn. His assistant trainers teased Lukas, “Where’s the gift shop?” Lukas would occasionally send stablehands home if they reported to work in dirty clothes. But the men and woman working there knew that like
